Finnish Zoo Returning Pandas to China Because of Cost

Lumi and Pyry, two pandas who have spent the past six years living in a zoo in central Finland, are heading back to China this year, more than eight years earlier than planned.

But both Finland and China insist that it isn’t a breakdown in “panda diplomacy.”

It simply turns out that pandas are pricey guests.

Hopes had been high when Lumi and Pyry, a female and male pair whose names mean Snow and Blizzard in Finnish, and who are known as Jin Baobao and Hua Bao in China, arrived in Finland in early 2018 on a 15-year loan.

Thousands of people came out to watch their convoy arrive, according to the Finnish news media. And about 280,000 people visited the Ahtari Zoo that year, Arja Valiaho, the zoo’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview on Thursday— more than double its visitor traffic in 2017.

The zoo, riding an initial wave of enthusiasm, spent about $9.5 million to build them a Panda House, Ms. Valiaho said. Then, it spent about $1.7 million a year on their upkeep, she said, including energy and maintenance costs and staff salaries, and about $223,000 in bamboo, shipped from the Netherlands. (Pandas eat 26 to 84 pounds of it every day.) Zoos also commonly pay an annual fee to China to host its pandas, although Ms. Valiaho declined to comment on whether it was part of the Ahtari Zoo’s arrangement.

But the zoo, which is at least a two-hour drive from any major Finnish city, has struggled to keep up its foot traffic and thus revenue from ticket sales, as Finland endured the coronavirus pandemic, steep inflation spurred in part by Russia’s war in Ukraine and a dip in domestic tourism.

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Source link : https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/26/world/europe/finland-china-pandas-return.html

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Publish date : 2024-09-26 07:00:00

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